Backblaze

Backblaze Personal Backup does one job exceptionally well: it automatically backs up your entire computer — every file, with no storage cap — for a flat yearly price. It isn't a Dropbox-style sync-and-share service; it's insurance against a dead laptop, ransomware or theft, running quietly in the background so your whole machine is covered without you thinking about it. The same company also runs B2, a separate cloud object-storage service aimed at businesses and developers, but the consumer product is pure set-and-forget backup.

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Yes — Backblaze works fully in Canada. You install the client, it backs up over the internet to Backblaze's data centres (in US and EU regions), and restores come either by download or, for large recoveries, on a physical drive shipped to you. The one caveat is data residency: there's no Canadian data region, so if in-country storage is a hard requirement you should weigh that. For everyday personal backup, most Canadians are comfortable with the arrangement.

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It's backup-only by design: no file syncing and no sharing links like Dropbox's. One licence covers exactly one computer (plus its connected external drives), so multi-device households pay per machine. Deleted-file history is limited to a rolling window unless you pay for extended version history, and your data sits in US or EU regions rather than Canada. None of this is a flaw so much as a scope choice — if you want sync, sharing or multi-device pooling, IDrive fits better; as pure whole-computer backup, nothing here is simpler.

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Focus and scale. Backblaze does essentially one consumer product — whole-computer backup — and runs it on its own custom-built 'storage pods', whose designs it famously publishes, keeping its infrastructure costs among the lowest in the industry. 'Unlimited' works financially because typical users average out: heavy users are balanced by light ones. With hundreds of thousands of customers, the flat price stays sustainable. In short, it's cheap because it's specialised and efficient, not because it cuts corners on durability — your data is stored redundantly across its fleet.

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Yes — it's a Nasdaq-listed US company (founded 2007) known for radical transparency: it publicly publishes its hard-drive failure statistics and storage-pod designs, which few rivals do. Backups are AES-encrypted, and you can set an optional private encryption key so that only you can unlock them (worth doing for sensitive data). With more than half a million customers and the accountability that comes with being a public company, it has a long, clean track record. The main trade-off is US jurisdiction, relevant if that's part of your threat model.

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They solve different problems, so it's not really head-to-head. Google Drive syncs and shares selected files and gives you 15 GB free, but it doesn't automatically protect your whole machine. Backblaze backs up everything on the computer, with no storage limit, for a flat fee — but offers no sharing or collaboration. Many people sensibly run both: Google Drive for the active files they share and edit, Backblaze as the invisible safety net behind the entire system. If you can only pick one, choose by need — live collaboration or disaster recovery.

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Backblaze is billed annually rather than monthly: one flat charge of US$99/yr covers unlimited backup of a single computer, which works out to just a few dollars a month — very little for uncapped storage. Extended one-year version history costs a small amount extra. Because it's genuinely unlimited, the effective per-gigabyte cost for anyone with a large photo or video library is essentially unbeatable in this comparison; the more you back up, the better the deal gets.

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